Authority

“Authority” is not one thing. Aristotle might remind us that it is said in many ways. Two of the most important have nearly opposite senses. One asserts an arbitrary power over others, or an entitlement to coerce others: “Do what you are told”. Why? “Because I said so”. The other is a kind of earned respect that is virtually identical with justification.

An important case is what is called argument from authority. There are practical situations in which very rapid response is required, and there is literally no time for debate. We don’t hesitate to simply grab a child who is in danger from an oncoming car, and we don’t consider this a violation of Kantian respect for others. We also tend to trust the judgment of those we judge to have good judgment. But in any situation in which what is good or what is true is disputed, argument from authority is basically cheating.

“Because I said so” or “because someone in authority said so” is logically circular, and a circular argument does not establish anything. A particularly insidious version of this is appeals to the will of God, as if all by itself this were a criterion of what is right.

What these conceal is the speaker’s unboundedly prideful implicit claim to personally know the will of God beyond any doubt, regardless of anyone else’s contrary view of what the will of God is.

Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro portrays Socrates as asking whether we should say that a thing is holy because the gods love it, or on the contrary that the gods love a thing because it is holy. ”Because the gods love it” or “because it is God’s will” is logically equivalent to “because I said so”, because the speaker simply assumes it is beyond doubt that the speaker’s view is God’s view.

Building on Plato, Leibniz asks whether a thing is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and just, and answers that it must be the latter, because to assert the former would make of God a tyrant rather than a being good and just. If on the other hand God is good and just, and therefore wills whatever is actually good and just in each situation, then we are responsible for understanding what is good and just in each case.

Claimed entitlements to coerce others should require substantial justification. We might be tempted to say that no one should ever coerce anyone else, but there are sociopaths and Nazis who do not respect others at all. The problem is that once an authority to coerce is instituted, it takes on a life of its own, and is prone to abuse. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But occasionally, coercion is the only way to avoid a greater evil. There are no easy answers here.

Subject of Passion

Here I will very briefly treat Alain de Libera’s Le sujet de la passion (2021), which consists of his 2016 lectures at the College de France. The modern notion of a subject-agent, he has previously argued at length, has its origins not in Descartes but in Latin scholasticism. Here in part he takes the argument back further, to the Greek fathers of the Christian church and their speculations about the nature of Christ. He takes up the theme of a “decolonization” of the Middle Ages and of theology, which have been stigmatized since early modernity. As usual, he covers a vast territory that I will only sample.

He begins on a humorous note. “Sociopaths don’t yawn, we say. Or better, they do not know yawning by contagion. They do not suffer when they see someone else suffer. They do not know pity. Generally, they haven’t read Aristotle” (p. 12, my translation throughout). He recalls Aristotle’s numerous statements that action and passion reside in the patient, not the agent.

He goes on to note how the 17th century writer Le Laboureur argued that French is superior to Latin, because its word order more explicitly refers every action to a subject. Le Laboureur claimed that “Cicero and all the Romans thought in French before they spoke in Latin” (p. 20). Bemusedly, de Libera points out that in the 20th century, Martin Heidegger claimed that French writers must do their thinking in German, because German is the naturally philosophical language.

“While the notion of subject-agent can appear as contradictory — it only has historical purchase once what I call the ‘chiasm of agency’, that is to say, the devolution of the functions and conditions of agency to the ‘subject’, has been realized –, the notion of subject-patient poses no problem: it is the sense that the word ‘subject’ originally had, otherwise said before the chiasm, the hypokeimenon–subjectum, which, we have seen many times, in Augustine as in Aristotle, designates a support or a substrate, … in short a bearer, a receptor of qualities or accidental properties.”

“This poses the problem of WHICH is the subject who suffers, then WHO is the subject who suffers, the passage from the WHICH to the WHO” (pp. 57-58).

“Is there a single subject of thought, of perception, and of emotions? Or: Who says ‘I’ in ‘I think’, ‘I perceive’, ‘I feel’?” (p. 59).

“Can we say ‘it suffers in me’, like we say, with Schelling, it thinks in me?… We can perhaps admit that I am not the subject of my thoughts or that there is in me a subject of my thoughts that is not a part of me, but indeed only something in me, aliquid in anima rather than aliquid animae — for example, the nous, the intellect called ‘possible’ or ‘patient’ in medieval philosophy — but can this hold good for suffering, can it hold good for passion, can it hold good for what we today call emotion? We can doubt this…. Passion implies the body, suffering implies the body, we say. Thought does not imply it” (pp. 59-60).

“I respond: for a dualist [such as Descartes], thought does not imply the body. But not everyone is a dualist. For an Aristotelian, for example, especially an Averroist, intellect has need of the body, because it has need of a furnisher of images. It has need of the body and its images not as a subject, but as an object. Cannot the same argument be made for passion, for suffering, for pain?” (p. 60).

“[I]s it not evident that if there is a subject of my passion, it can only be a subject-patient, and that the last can only be me, whatever thing or entity the term ‘me’ designates: body, or soul, or soul united with a body…?” (ibid).

Emphasizing how christological debates among theologians have affected common views of the human, he recalls the aim of what he previously called a deconstruction of the Heideggerian deconstruction of subjectivity, which among other things ignores this aspect.

“The articulation between Passion — upper case — and passion — lower case is the central element of the archaeology of the subject of passion” (p. 66).

“The central element is the introduction of hypostatic union into anthropology, otherwise said, the intervention of the subject — of the hypostasis — in the relation soul-body, and indeed in the relation spirit-soul-body… which makes possible the emergence of the person as subject where not only actions, but also passions are susceptible to imputation” (p. 493).

Beginning of this series: Archaeology of the Subject

Imagination and Reflection

I find myself advocating a quasi-dualist account of subjectivity grounded in imagination and reflection, on top of a non-dualist first philosophy that puts questions of value and meaning before questions of logistics.

Imagination lies at the basis of all first-order awareness. Closely tied at an organic level to sense perception and emotion, it immediatizes things into the form of apparently self-contained, presentable objects. Immediatization is a complex process of synthesis of awareness or “consciousness” that in a human combines what common sense would call impressions of external things with previous results of reflection. This initial synthesis of awareness or consciousness occurs outside of awareness or consciousness.

Once the immediatization by imagination has done its work, we are left with the appearance of a simple transparency of consciousness in which objects are presented. “Appearance” and “consciousness” are correlated terms — all consciousness is consciousness of appearance, and all appearance involves consciousness. Everything in consciousness is an appearance. Some appearances are well-founded, others are not.

It is reflection that works on appearance to distinguish whether or not it is well-founded, and that grounds any well-foundedness of the appearance. Reflection may also consider what is better in a given context. It is the basis of both practical and theoretical wisdom. There is no reflection without the involvement of consciousness at some point, but consciousness does not necessarily involve reflection. Reflection is an open-ended discursive relation, in which the identities of things are not necessarily taken for granted.

One of Kant’s important conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason is that the figurative synthesis of imagination involves the same fundamental forms of judgment as conscious reasoning. Hypothetical (if-then) and disjunctive (distinction-making) judgments are what give meaning to both, and this is why reason can be applicable to experience: for us talking animals, all experience already involves judgment at a preconscious level. Reflection then involves a questioning and refinement (up to possible overturning) of our preconscious judgments that apply patterns of past judgment to new experience.

Consciousness and Identity

Previously, I raised a doubt about Robert Pippin’s statement to the effect that “I know I am the one acting because I am the one acting”. For this line of argument, he cites Sebastian Rödl’s work. Pippin also says, drawing on Rödl, that “judgment is the consciousness of judging” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 105).

In the first case, my doubt had to do with what counts as knowledge. I tend to adhere to Plato’s sharp distinction between knowledge on the one hand, and belief or opinion on the other. In the second case, I draw a sharp line between Hegelian consciousness and self-consciousness, or between Kantian empirical and transcendental subjectivity (see numerous posts under Subjectivity). It is my contention that when they are being more careful, both Kant and Hegel too emphasize such a distinction. But they both also make more casual remarks that blur the distinction.

Judgment in the Kantian and Hegelian sense, I want to say, belongs to reflection and to what Hegel calls self-consciousness, which is not a kind of plain simple “consciousness” that just happens to take for its object a substantial “self”, but something else altogether. The plain simple consciousness that we share at least with all animals has an organic basis related to perception and emotion, but no one is born with self-consciousness. Self-consciousness belongs to what the scholastics used to call second nature. In modern terms, it is in part a cultural acquisition, and in part something that we give birth to ourselves, or, as Hegel might prefer to say, that is able to give birth to itself in us, once we have the necessary acculturation.

Ordinary consciousness includes what has traditionally been called inner sense. This involves immediately having images of one’s (empirical) self, or of aspects of it, analogous to the way that we experience external sensation. This is a kind of imagination, not a kind of reflexivity.

Thought and judgment on the other hand are inherently reflexive, and self-conscious in the sense of reflexivity, but — I want to say, and I think this is implicit in Aristotle and Hegel — the reflexivity of thought and judgment belongs directly to each specific thought and judgment itself, rather than to a separate substantial “self” that “has” them. In the main example that Pippin gives, the reflexivity of a judgment consists in all the reasons for it, which refer to it.

At one point in this discussion, Pippin says that “Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (p. 107). He quotes Hegel saying that the “original deed” corresponding to a Kantian unity of apperception is “liberated from the opposition of consciousness, is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed. The name ‘consciousness’ gives it more of a semblance of subjectivity than does the term ‘thought’, which here, however, is to be taken in the absolute sense of infinite thought, not encumbered by the finitude of consciousness” (pp. 107-108).

This is what I have been saying, and I do not see how it can be reconciled with the claim that judgment is identical to a consciousness of judgment, if judgment is inherently apperceptive. Apperception is something higher than mere consciousness. Apperception and judgment are inherently discursive; mere consciousness is not.

Which comes first, reasons we live by and things we care about, or a substantial self? I say it is what we live by and care about. Put another way, it is discursivity and not consciousness that involves reflexivity. (And even our basic sentience need not be attributed to a substantial self. See Droplets of Sentience?.)

What is true is that judgment does presuppose that misleadingly designated “self-consciousness” which is not a kind of consciousness and does not involve a substantial self. Consciousness of judgment would be judgment’s presentation in imagination. It may well be true that there is no judgment without its also being presented in imagination, but a reflexive, apperceptive, discursive judgment and its immediate presentation as an image in animal imagination are by no means the same thing.

Passivity Revisited

One point on which I sharply differ from Pippin is his claim that Aristotelian intellect is purely passive. I think I have sufficiently documented that this is not historically accurate. But the context of Pippin’s claim is Kant’s great elaboration of the active side of judging and thinking. And undoubtedly, Kant was arguing against a received view. So whose view was it?

I think the answer has to be Leibniz, his popularizer Christian Wolff, and the Wolffians like Mendelsohn and Baumgarten who dominated philosophy in German universities in Kant’s time. An examination of Kant’s work shows that most of the received views Kant argues against are Wolffian views.

Basic to Leibniz’s and the Wolffians’ point of view is a very categorical preformationism. One of Leibniz’s best known theses asserts a pre-established harmony that not only aims to explain the relationship of mind and body, but encompasses all things whatsoever. According to Leibniz, God creates nothing less than an entire, coherent world, every detail of which is providentially anticipated in advance. Once there is a world, God never “intervenes” in it, because all the work of providence was done in creation. (Providence in the Greek (pronoia) is literally forethought.) God’s creative act consists in the selection of the best of all possible worlds. I personally regard the pre-established harmony as a kind of Platonic myth or “as if” — a speculative hypothesis that makes a kind of poetic sense, but is nonetheless very extravagant.

Consistent with his assertion of pre-established harmony, Leibniz denies that there is real causal interaction between things in the world. Instead, each being carries within it a microcosm of the whole, and is causally affected only by God.

One of Kant’s earliest publications was a defense of real causal interaction against Leibniz. Whether or not Kant thought about it at the time, he was effectively defending an Aristotelian view of the reality of secondary causes. Against this wider background, Kant’s later insistence on the active character of thought can be seen as taking the perspective that we too rank among the real secondary causes.

If the harmony of all things were pre-established, there would be no active work for intellect to do. It would just need to assimilate itself to the pre-established harmony. Intellect would thus be a passive recognition of pre-existing structures. Thus the Leibnizian-Wolffian world view intrinsically promotes the passivity of intellect that Kant opposes.

Reflection and Apperception

According to Robert Pippin, the most important feature of Kant’s theory of thinking, account-giving, and judging is that “judging is apperceptive” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 103). “Apperception” is a term coined by Leibniz. The “ap-” prefix etymologically suggests a redoubling of perception, or a “perception of perception”. Leibniz broadens its meaning to cover all forms of self-awareness. Aristotle’s surviving texts include only a few lines about the “common sense”, which both synthesizes inputs from different senses into perceptions of objects, and is the root of self-awareness. Kant’s first and third Critiques greatly expand on this.

Pippin quotes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception” (p. 102), commenting, “This is a new theory of judgment and accordingly grounds a new logic” (ibid). That judging is apperceptive is for Hegel a logical truth.

Therefore, for Hegel “it is quite misleading for Kant to formulate the point by saying that the ‘I think’ must ‘accompany’ (begleiten) all my representations (B132). Representing objects is not representing objects, a claiming to be so, unless apperceptive (which is in effect what the B132 passage claims). And that has to mean, in a very peculiar sense that is important to Hegel and that will take some time to unpack, that such judgings are necessarily and inherently reflexive, and so at the very least are self-referential, even if such a reflected content is not substantive, does not refer to a subject’s focusing on her judging activity as if it were a second consciousness.”

“Virtually everything in [Hegel’s] Logic of significance descends in one way or another from the proper understanding of this claim” (p. 103).

He quotes Hegel, “The concept, when it has progressed to a concrete existence which is itself free, is none other than the ‘I’ or pure self-consciousness” (p. 104).

I like to turn this last point around, and say that self-consciousness, the pure ‘I’, for Hegel is none other than the concept — not a static self-image, but a pure reference to the active taking of things to be thus-and-such. My individual essence as a “rational” animal is constituted by all that I care about and hold to be true, as confirmed in my actions and follow-through, not by what I happen to believe about myself.

What Pippin calls the “very peculiar” sense in which apperceptive judging inherently involves reflection and self-reference seems completely normal to me. My self-consciousness straightforwardly consists of what I actually care about and hold to be true, not some abstract “consciousness of consciousness”, in which ordinary consciousness would be its own object. It is not mere organic consciousness or “awareness”, but self-consciousness — Kantian discursive “taking as” — that is inherently reflexive.

This is a relational reflexivity that does not presuppose a substantial “self”, only a kind of “adverbial” self-reference. Takings have reasons, which in turn have other reasons. When all goes well, the reasons mutually support one another, and there is no infinite regress. This results in what Kant calls a unity of apperception, which is a truer, deeper self than any self-image we may have, and indeed not an image at all — and not something presupposed or achieved once and for all, but something we must constantly aim for anew, even when we did just achieve it.

We are the sum of our takings. Meanwhile, what we take to be the case — and what we take to be important or good — is not necessarily what we say it is, but what our actions and follow-through imply.

The Scope of Reflection in Hegel

It now seems to me that reflection turns out to be the driving concept in Hegel’s Logic, and indeed perhaps in Hegel overall. This is fairly amazing, given the prevalence of accounts that do not even mention reflection, or do so only incidentally. True, the ambivalence with which Hegel treats most of his key terms is strongly in evidence here, insofar as he also makes many remarks about the limits of merely “external” reflection. But reflection seems to be a central orienting concept that says many of the same things as Hegelian “mediation” or “dialectic”, says them a bit more clearly, and thus expresses more.

What has particularly captured my interest is the reflection Hegel specifies as “general” or “absolute”. Merely external reflection correlates with the way that he characterizes mere “Consciousness” in the Phenomenology, in which subject and object are mutually exclusive terms, each defined in opposition to the other. But what he calls “general” reflection seems to precisely name a perspective that is at home in what the Phenomenology‘s Preface calls “otherness”, and in which the polarity of subject and object things is replaced by a continuum of relational distinctions. And indirectly, reflection names that otherness itself.

As the last couple of posts have begun to evidence, reflection plays an explicitly central role in the “logic of essence” that Hegel develops in book II of his Logic, which in contrast to the results of the logic of being in book I is said to represent a permanent acquisition. And although the term “reflection” is no longer literally at center stage in book III’s “logic of the concept”, the work done with it in book II is incorporated into the very “concept of the concept” at the beginning of book III.

“[T]he concept is at first to be regarded simply as the third to being and essence, to the immediate and to reflection” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book III, p. 508, emphasis in original).

He had begun book II by saying essence is the “truth” of being. In just the same way, then, Hegel is saying here that reflection is the “truth” of the immediate.

“Hence the objective logic, which treats of being and essence, constitutes in truth the genetic exposition of the concept…. The dialectical movement of substance through causality and reciprocal affection is thus the immediate genesis of the concept by virtue of which its becoming is displayed. But the meaning of its becoming, like that of all becoming, is that it is the reflection of something which passes over into its ground, and that the at first apparent other into which this something has passed over constitutes the truth of the latter” (p. 509, emphasis in original).

For immediacy, then, reflection is this other that Hegel calls its truth. Immediacy itself is untrue, but it “has” a truth in reflection. Mere being or immediacy by itself is sterile, but reflection makes it fruitful.

I haven’t yet treated Hegel’s discussion of substance and causality within the logic of essence. For now, what I want to draw attention to is his more general point that the logic of essence — which could equally be termed the logic of reflection — already shows, and indeed primarily deals with, the genesis and becoming of the concept. By contrast, what he calls the logic of the concept treats the concept of the concept as already achieved, and focuses on a suitably expansive treatment of its use in judgment and inference.

“The concept is now this absolute unity of being and reflection whereby being-in-and-for-itself only is by being equally reflection or positedness, and positedness only is by being equally in-and-for-itself” (ibid).

Previously, we left simple being, subjects and objects, and existence claims behind, but now being returns, as relatedness and in the content of what we affirm.

For Kant and Fichte, any unqualified reference to being or to what “is” can only be dogmatic. All that we can undogmatically talk about are judgments about what is, and all judgments are subject to questioning about their reasons. (Fichte characteristically speaks of judgments that we affirm as “posited”.)

Hegel regards Kant and Fichte’s effective ban on direct talk about what is as making an extremely important point, but also as overly fastidious. In effect, he wants to suggest that the deeper meaning of “is” coincides with what can reasonably be judged to be the case, and I think Plato and Aristotle would agree.

At the level of what Hegel calls the concept, we have achieved a kind of indifference with respect to talk about being or the immediate. What this means is that what a truly universal community of rational beings would reflectively judge to be the case is constitutive of what we should say “is”.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hegel defers all consideration of normativity and teleology to the logic of the concept in book III, whereas the more explicit discussion of reflection is in the logic of essence in book II. But Hegel’s Logic is ordered as a successive uncovering of presuppositions: in order to successfully claim this apparently simple and straightforward thing, we discover that we must also presuppose that more subtle thing. So the true order of dependency he means to affirm is the opposite of his order of presentation. He also saves his discussion of the “tedious” traditional-logical topics of forms of judgment and syllogisms for book III, but this is with the intent of radically transforming them.

What he really wants to advocate in this last context is a view of judgment and inference — simultaneously very Aristotelian and very nontraditional — as fundamentally reflective and normative, rather than fundamentally formal and quasi-mechanical in nature. The apparent textual separation of reflection from normativity is thus only an appearance. (See also Apperceptive Judgment; Hegel on Reflection; Reflection and Dialectic.)

Identity, Difference, Reflection

Reflection is also the key to Hegel’s often misunderstood views on identity and difference.

“Reflection is the shining of essence within itself. Essence, as infinite immanent turning back is not immediate simplicity, but negative simplicity; it is a movement across moments that are distinct, is absolute mediation with itself. But in these moments it shines; the moments are, therefore, themselves determinations reflected into themselves” (Hegel, Logic, di Giovanni trans., p. 354, emphasis in original).

He goes on to discuss identity, difference, and the notorious “contradiction” as principal moments or determinations of reflection. Sometimes he uses these terms in the conventional way — of which he is highly critical — and sometimes he gives them his own meaning.

On Aristotelian grounds, I have long had doubts about appeals to an implicitly immediate simplicity or “identity” of substance in traditional metaphysics. I take these to be a form of Platonizing that originated in the neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle. Hegel’s alternative suggestion of a “negative simplicity” seems much more plausible generally, as well as more consistent with the Aristotelian texts. We just have to get past the difficulty of Hegel’s idiosyncratic metaphorical straining of language about “negation”, and recognize that he is inventing ways to talk about the limits of representation, rather than grossly abusing the “classical” negation of formal logic.

Hegel’s remarks about identity are actually pretty clear, and worth quoting at length. As with negation, in Hegel identity, difference, and “contradiction” only have the meanings that they have in classical logic when he is pointing out their limitations. The alternative meanings that he actually endorses deeply reflect his critique of representationalism.

“In its positive formulation, A = A, [the principle of identity in classical logic] is at first no more than the expression of empty tautology. It is rightly said, therefore, that this law of thought is without content and that it leads nowhere. It is thus to an empty identity that they cling, those who take it to be something true, insisting that identity is not difference but that the two are different. They do not see that in saying, ‘Identity is different from difference’, they have thereby already said that identity is something different. And since this must also be conceded as the nature of identity, the implication is that to be different belongs to identity not externally, but within it, in its nature. — But, further, inasmuch as these same individuals hold firm to their unmoved identity, of which the opposite is difference, they do not see that they have thereby reduced it to a one-sided determinateness which, as such, has no truth. They are conceding that the principle of identity only expresses a one-sided determinateness, that it only contains formal truth, truth abstract and incomplete. — Immediately implied in this correct judgment, however, is that the truth is complete only in the unity of identity and difference, and, consequently, that it only consists in this unity. When asserting that formal identity is incomplete, there is vaguely present to one’s mind the totality, measured against which that identity is incomplete; but the moment one insists that identity is absolutely separate from difference and in this separation takes it to be something essential, valid, true, then what transpires from these two contradictory claims is only the failure to reconcile these two thoughts: that identity as abstract identity is essential, but that, as such, it is equally incomplete. What is lacking is awareness of the negative moment as [that by] which, in these claims, identity itself is displayed. — Or when this is said, that identity is identity essentially as separation from difference or in the separation from difference, then right there we have the expressed truth about it, namely that [formal] identity consists in being separation as such, or in being essentially in the separation, that is, it is nothing for itself but is rather moment of separation.”

“As to the other confirmation of the absolute truth of the principle of identity, this is made to rest on experience in so far as appeal is made to the experience of every consciousness; for anyone presented with this proposition, ‘A is A’, ‘a tree is a tree’, immediately grants it and is satisfied that the proposition is self-evident and in need of no further justification or demonstration.”

“On the one hand, this appeal to experience, that every consciousness acknowledges the principle universally, is a mere manner of speaking. For nobody will want to say that the abstract proposition, ‘A is A’, has actually been tried out in every consciousness. The appeal to actual experience is therefore not in earnest but is rather only an assurance that, if the experiment were made, universal acknowledgement of the proposition would be the result. — And if it is not the abstract proposition as such that is meant, but the proposition in concrete application, from which application the abstract proposition would then have to be developed, then the claim to the universality and immediacy of the latter would consist in the fact that every consciousness assumes it or implies it as a foundation, and indeed does so in every utterance. But the concrete and the application are precisely in the reference that connects simple identity with a manifold which is different from it. Expressed as a proposition, the concrete would be first of all a synthetic proposition. From this concrete itself, or from the synthetic proposition expressing it, abstraction could indeed extract the principle of identity through analysis; but, in actual fact, it would not then leave experience as it is but would have altered it, since in experience the identity was rather in unity with difference. And this is the immediate refutation if the claim that abstract identity is as such something true, for what transpires in experience is the verry opposite, namely identity only united with difference” (pp. 358-359, emphasis in original).

“Identity, instead of being in itself the truth and the absolute truth, is thus rather the opposite; instead of being the unmoved simple, it surpasses itself into the dissolution of itself.”

“More is entailed, therefore, in the form of the proposition expressing identity than simple, abstract identity; entailed by it is this pure movement of reflection in the course of which there emerges the other, but only as reflective shine, as immediately disappearing…. The propositional form can be regarded as the hidden necessity of adding to abstract identity the extra factor of that movement…. Consequently, if appeal is made to what appearance indicates, then the result is this: that in the expression of identity, difference also immediately emerges” (p. 360, emphasis in original).

“From this it is clear that the principle of identity itself, and still more the principle of contradiction, are not of merely analytical but of synthetic nature” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Here he uses Kant’s distinction of analytic from synthetic judgments. Analytic judgments are purely formal and tautological; canonically, the predicate is considered to be literally implied by the subject. Synthetic judgments on the other hand go beyond what is already implied by the subject or premises. This includes most judgments in ordinary experience. Synthetic judgments involve the material inference that Robert Brandom has particularly expounded in recent times.

“Thus the result of this consideration is this: (1) the principle of identity or contradiction, when meant to express merely abstract identity in opposition to difference as a truth, is not a law of thought but expresses rather the opposite of it; (2) these two principles contain more than is meant by them, namely this opposite, absolute difference itself” (p. 361, emphasis in original).

Shine and Reflection

Hegel introduces reflection in by contrasting it with immediacy and simple being.

“The truth of being is essence.”

“Being is the immediate. Since the goal of knowledge is the truth, what being is in and for itself, knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there still is something other than being itself, and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is a mediated knowledge, for it is not to be found with and in essence immediately, but starts off from an other, from being, and has a prior way to make, the way that leads over and beyond being or that rather penetrates into it. Only insofar as knowledge recollects itself into itself out of immediate being, does it find essence through this mediation” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book II, p. 337).

Knowledge “does not stop at the immediate”. The perspective of “Being” for Hegel is a mere starting point that turns out to be unsustainable on its own terms. Being by itself is not sufficient to make anything intelligible. Essence on the other hand begins to give us truth.

He goes on to say what essence is, in terms of reflection. This is initially introduced in rather classic Hegelese:

“For essence is an infinite self-contained movement which determines its immediacy as negativity and its negativity as immediacy, and is thus the shining of itself within itself. In this, in its self-movement, essence is reflection” (p. 345).

Each part of this actually makes sense, if you think in terms of reflection from the start and treat immediacy as derivative, which is just what Hegel ends up recommending here. Reflection is Hegel’s model for “good” infinity.

The metaphorical “shining” above is wordplay on Schein, Hegel’s term for a kind of appearance, which di Giovanni renders as “shine”. Kant had spoken of the Schein or illusion produced by pure reason outside the realm of experience. As an appearance-like thing, shine is contrasted with essence. For Hegel, essence is to be found nowhere else than within shine, but the articulation of essence involves a selectivity, distinction, and elaboration within shine that the logic of being (based as it is on a principle of indifference) is unable to support.

“Shine is the same as what reflection is; but it is reflection as immediate. For this shine which is internalized and therefore alienated from its immediacy, the German has a word from an alien language, ‘Reflexion’.”

“Essence is reflection, the movement of becoming and transition that remains within itself, wherein that which is distinguished is determined simply and solely as the negative itself” (ibid).

Hegel introduces talk about “the negative” as a reminder that higher thought requires moving beyond pre-given or “fixed” concepts. This “negative” has virtually nothing to do with classical negation in formal logic.

“In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other” (ibid).

Being is supposed to be a stable foundation, but for Hegel any true stability of intelligibility cannot come from a foundation in mere fixity. At this level, any determinateness and any intelligibility really depend not on being as such, but on relation and relatedness that is external to the supposed foundation.

He continues, “Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only in self-referring” (ibid).

Here he explicitly connects negativity with reflection and self-reference, vocabulary I find far more illuminating.

Reflective judgment works in part by a sort of hall of mirrors effect, in which the back-and-forth of reflection effectively moots the question of which was the original of the images. All that remains is a new level of variegated and articulated whole. Hegel is saying something like essence is the equilibrium resulting from the back-and-forth of reflection. This is how intelligibility originates. Relations are prior to any notion of being that is not utterly indeterminate.

The following passage, read slowly and carefully, elaborates this identification of the Hegelian negative with self-reference and reflection. It portrays reflection as bootstrapping itself.

“The self-reference of the negative is therefore its turning back on itself; it is immediacy as the sublating of the negative, but immediacy simply and solely as this reference or as turning back from a one, and hence as self-sublating of immediacy. — This is positedness, immediacy purely as determinateness or self-reflecting. This immediacy, which is only as the turning back of the negative into itself, is the immediacy which constitutes the determinateness of shine, and from which the previous reflective movement seemed to begin. But, far from being able to begin with this immediacy, the latter first is rather as the turning back or as the reflection itself” (p. 347).

He says quite clearly that immediacy is only the semblance of a beginning.

“Immediacy comes on the scene simply and solely as a turning back and is that negative which is the semblance of a beginning, the beginning which the return negates” (ibid).

He explicitly recalls the Kantian background here.

“Reflection is usually taken in a subjective sense as the movement of judgment which transcends an immediately given representation and seeks more universal determinations for it or compares it with such determinations. Kant opposes reflective and determining judgment (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, pp. xxiiiff.). He defines judgment in general as the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determining. But if what is given is only a particular, for which it is up to the judgment to find the universal, then the judgment is reflecting. Here, too, reflection is therefore a matter of rising above the immediate to the universal. On the one hand, the immediate is determined as particular only by being thus referred to its universal; for itself, it is only a singular or an immediate existent. But, on the other hand, that to which it is referred, its universal, its rule, principle, law, is in general that which is reflected into itself, which refers itself to itself, is the essence or the essential.”

“But at issue here is neither the reflection of consciousness, nor the more specific reflection of the understanding that has the particular and the universal for its determinations, but reflection in general. It is clear that the reflection to which Kant assigns the search of the universal for a given particular is likewise only an external reflection which applies itself to the immediate as to something given. — But the concept of absolute reflection, too, is implicit in it. For the universal, the principle or the rule and law, to which reflection rises in its process of determination is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which the reflection began; the immediate, therefore, to be a nothingness which is posited in its true being only by the turning back of the reflection from it, by the determining of reflection. Therefore, that which reflection does to the immediate, and the determinations that derive from it, is not anything external to it but rather its true being” (p. 350).

Here we are far indeed from early modern representationalism and its “given” objects, traces of which Hegel still finds in Kant. Yet nothing could be more contrary to this point of view than subjective arbitrariness. The process of the back-and-forth of reflection generates shareable rational objectivity out of practical distinctions of value. And reflection does not live within the confines of one person’s head. Hegel emphasizes the continuity of the inner and the outer, and elsewhere explicitly proposes mutual recognition as the ground not only of ethics but also of knowledge.

Life: Between Nature and Meaning

I have wanted to emphasize the goodness of life, in spite of the fact that many things are wrong in the world. But what is “life”? I don’t have a completely satisfying answer, but I do have a few thoughts.

Nature is said in many ways, of course, and these yield different perspectives on life from the side of nature. In an evolutionary context, I prefer to stress the marvelous diversification of organic forms over competition between individuals or species. Life, I think, is better understood in terms of purposes and what Aristotle calls “that for the sake of which”, than by attempting to reduce it to elements and efficient causes. All those purposes are intrinsic to the nature of the things that have them, and indeed they constitute that nature.

It does not make sense to inquire about “the” meaning of life. Rather, life is meaning, in superabundance and overflow. We should look at life not in terms of minimal biological prerequisites, but in terms of its highest development in each of the many kinds that flourish. That is the real significance of Aristotelian and Hegelian “actuality”.